Blackhorn hc 10: really roster dependent?

my guild is having a lot (I mean a lot) problems with this fight, mostly (imho) due to lack of roster. Have you defeat this encounter without enough ranged dps and without dk for sapper? Some advice?

Our roster is:
Tanks:

Warrior

Bear

Healers:

Pally

Disc Priest

DPS:

Fire Mage (also try as arcane, but as fire solo-soak one twilight barrage per round)

Elemental Shaman

Hunter

Rogue

Retry pally

Enhancement Shaman

We also have another rogue and cat/resto druid. Our strategy is as follow: Elemental & Hunter for one drake and fire mage for the other. One tank for each round of adds and he tries to position the adds next to the mage's drake. The tank without adds tries to soak twilight barrages alone or with other players. Our main problem is with sapper, the boat's life normally is not a problem (we are soaking the huge ones between all party). The drakes normally do not fly away unless there is fire next to the mage's drake (and the melees cannot hit it, bad luck). We have only reach second phase once but we killed drakes first in the last round, really bad decision.

In my opinion we need a dk in our roster and without it we are doing "Blackhorn hc²" and hitting ourself day after day against a huge wall.

Unfortunately, Warmaster Blackhorn is exceedingly difficult without deathknight. It is possible with stuns but I think it's the 4th big explosion that lines up with the sapper. Maybe you can have the fire mage solo soak this if the ship's health is high enough?

You have a lot of stuns... enough for at least 2 per sapper. Coordinate those and get your hunter to throw down a flare to get the sapper out of stealth a little earlier. Sappers shouldn't be a problem.

Which means we have good multidotting from the priest, warlock and boomkin, superb cleave from the rogue and Death Grip from the DK.
I think to make sure you get no, but maximum of 1, drake free of the harpoons is to have ranged focus one and melee focus one (after elites are dead), with ranged of course switching over to the other drake once theirs is dead.

ur fire mage should probly be arcane for heroic burst on drakes esp since ur lacking ranged... while cauterize does save people from death im pretty sure if the mage "dies" the ship takes the remainder dmg that he didnt take.. meaning its not really helping as much as u think.

I think if you had 1 extra ranged this fight be a lot better for you, taking out one of the melee. A DK (tank / melee) are great for death gripping sappers that land at 'annoying' times. You do have tanks to charge stun it and a ret pala and holy pala to help stun too, it might take a bit more effort to do this properly though especially since sappers love running through pesky fire. The more ranged the better for this fight, our first kill was a rogue and ret paladin, although we could of had only 1 melee and during practice we did have 1 melee for majority of attempts, but thankfully to tactic changes 2 was very viable for us.

Don't be dis-heartened if you wipe for a night on this guy, he is a big step up from all the other hcs. Don't be dis-heartened if you wipe for weeks :P We got it on our 3rd night of him, a friends guild on my server got him on the 8th night trying him, the point is don't worry! Also it will help getting a good p2 transition, let 1 drake survive a bit longer than usual while killing off the melee adds, allowing this can get rid of some of the fire that could potentially cause problems and also having nothing alive entering p2 is ideal due to enrage timer and more damage. Also I'm not sure what tactic you are using but we found it better to have everyone soak the Onslaughts minus the tank who is on melee adds at that time, we get into p2 usually with hp of ship 5-15% (varies every try) all you need is 1% anyway.

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I've killed it twice so far, both times with DK tank and a 4ranged2melee setup, so take my advice as a combination of theoretical & practical:

With a breakup of 3melee 3ranged I would suggest you handle the drakes like this:
## Split dps into two groups: G1: Ranged x3, G2: Melee x3.
## Ranged group takes whichever side there is fire on, melee take the opposite side.
## The tank(s) tank the mobs at the melee side drakes for cleavage (rogue/pally/fs-spread from shammy).

NOTE: This is the way I am planning to attempt this boss on Wednesday with a triple melee setup as our second kill seemed super easy.

We have our tanks solo tank the melee adds, with a rotation like so:
1st Wave: tank 1, 2nd Wave: tank 2, 3rd Wave: tank 1.
In your group comp case I would suggest the bear tanks the adds the first and third time, freeing up the warrior to soak the barrages, as well as focus on slow/stunning the Sappers when they spawn. The bear will only handle this 'job' whilst the warrior is tanking Wave #2.

Handling the Sapper:
a) Have someone call on vent/mumble/ts whenever the Sapper spawns.
b) Have your ranged slow the sapper the moment it lands (f.ex. get your Shaman to Frost Shock it using a macro) so that it is slowed PRIOR to becoming target-able for DPS to nuke it. I.e. When the sapper drops down, it is target-able for a split second before it vanishes and applying a 'slow' here would be godly.
c) Get your OT to charge/stun/reslow the Sapper moment it comes out of its Stealth mode. Have all ranged and as many melee switch to it ASAP to nuke it down.
W.r.t. the melee: you can afford to have 1-2 melee NOT stack into the Twilight Onslaught, if the sapper needs to be killed.

Phase 2:
## Get your ranged DPS to blow CDs to bring the Drake to 80% ASAP, your melee can finish off whatever melee adds are still up at this point (don't hesitate to kill off the third wave drakes before the 3rd wave melee adds are dead, as your 'OT' can pickup the boss while 3rd wave tank is handling the adds).
## On our First kill I made our raid stop DPS prior to getting the boss below 90% HP, including cleaves and Multi-DoTs, until the Drake was 'killed' = 20%. You don't really need to worry too much about this, and feel free to allow your melee/mult-DoTers to continue on the boss till it reaches 83-4% as that will help reduce any enrage problems. Just don't bring it below 80% imho till the drake has flown away.

Your fire mage can (and should) break sapper invisibility via blast wave, which also works as a slow effect, and I guess warrior Thunderstomp would work similar. We also use a tank with Dreadeblade (cleave add) to not soak onlaught but chase and stun sapper just in case.
Sappers isn't the major part of the fight, bringing DK does make it easier but not by a lot. Little barrages, fire and dps requirements on drakes will still be there.

ur fire mage should probly be arcane for heroic burst on drakes esp since ur lacking ranged... while cauterize does save people from death im pretty sure if the mage "dies" the ship takes the remainder dmg that he didnt take.. meaning its not really helping as much as u think.

Death knights are entirely optional on warmaster. It's a pleasant surprise to have one, but they bring so little that it's not worth bringing one specifically.

Your roster is rather poor in that you're looking to run 3 melee when 0-1 is optimal and two is pretty normal to go with. In addition you lack any of the strongest 3 classes on the fight (lock, spriest, moonkin) and will likely not have proper coe on everything.

The fight isn't heavily roster dependent, but it requires a moderately well composed composition.

It's called Bloodlust not Heroism. I used to be a good player once. Now I'm a casual

Well, didn't kill it yet, but so far we're going consistently in p2 with 2 paladins stuns and no DK, and as the 2nd melee, I'm killing one of the drake with one of the range while our rogue stays in the melee adds. I can see why having 3 melee would be an issue though, but put your melee on drakes, those need to die asap.

You have a bunch of CC's on every sapper,.....first have hunter flare to get the sapper out of CC, this will be the key to it. Then have the hunter concussion shot or scatter shot it,...if he cant get to it,...rogue stuns,....if fire mage procs a fire blast,..insta stun there's another. It is doable just difficult, fights are not supposed to be designed around one certain class,...but one certain class does make some of the mechanics easier per fight. Lastly,......is your ele and hunter getting their dragon down before it flies away? If not then have all ranged on one dragon as it is obviously better to have one dead dragon when they fly away, as opposed to two that are at 50%.

One thing my guild did, was had all our range focus on one drake and made sure it died, while having our tanks hold both adds next to another drake for melee cleaves, worked well, got him after about 50 or so attempts in total (19 or so with cleave strat)

We killed this boss last week with 3 melee, hard but not impossible. Roster as follows

Tanks

Prot Pally

Prot War (Tell him to learn to intervene for onslaughts and on CD!)

Healers

Resto Druid

Holy Pal

Holy Priest

Dps

Combat Rogue

Frost DK which helps with sappers but definitely not required, grip is more for emergencies

Surv Hunter

Enh Shaman

Demo Lock

Strat priorities:

kill sappers andKill the Drakes every time they come down, no exceptions-- have a melee chase during onslaught if you need to. All ranged on it 100% when it's out

Soak all onslaughts

Soak barrages where you can (aka, if you're not 100% sure you'll live or your partner is going to move with you, don't)

Have all of your ranged on one drake and all melee +tanks on the other. Melee should cleave off drake to adds, not vice versa.
If you kill drakes every time you reduce the number of barrages. Just soak where you can but don't risk people dying at all. Have a major CD for every onslaught. We phased our boat at around 18% IIRC. I'll hopefully have a fraps of our kill this week.

Tips for the sapper without a DK
Tank charges equal stun (warrior can completely lock him down w/ charge+leap+intercept)
Hunter flare does work to break out stealth early
Mage blast wave does work (per our sister guild)
Get a slow on him asap

Also, once you get to p2 you should be g2g, we lost a healer @20% and still one shot our 1st p2. Make sure you burn the drake 1st, minimal cleaves on the boss.